2024 handed me the most beautiful (also disorienting) plot twist of my life — motherhood. A “180 degree turn” that barely scratches the surface of what being a mother truly means. It isn’t just the sleepless nights or the new rhythm your body is forced to learn. It’s the quiet, almost violent shift in who you are. My priorities, my fears, my definition of strength, even the way I measure a good day, changed. It reminded me that not so long ago, I had stumbled upon 2 books – Hajar Churasir Maa and Kalpurush. These two narratives explore the archetype of the “all-sacrificing mother” who acts as the sole emotional anchor in a world of family betrayal and political chaos. I was captivated by both the mothers.
In Mother of 1084 (Hajar Churasir Maa) , we meet Sujata, a mother living in a wealthy yet morally hollow household where her son Brati’s revolutionary spirit is treated as a stain to be erased. Sujata endures a marriage where her husband justifies his own infidelity and traditional dominance—a hostile dynamic the other children normalize, but one that only Sujata and Brati truly see through. to earn enough, to do enough, to one day pull Sujata away from the suffocating fog of domestic chaos that she had silently endured for years. He wanted to rescue her. However, Fate smiled cruelly. A hand extended to innocent friends turns his life upside down. Overnight, Brati ceased to exist as a son. He became a number — 1084, which was cold, administrative, stripped of identity. The state reduced an entire human being, with his depth and devotion and dreams, to a Naxalite on a list. The delusional family retreats and quietly buries the truth under the unbearable weight of social fear -Ostracization. So they choose denial over dignity — Brati’s memory sacrificed at the altar of respectability. This is the crux where Sujata refuses to submit and so begins a mother’s relentless, heartbreaking pursuit — not for justice in any grand political sense, but simply for truth. “Who was Brati to you?” She chases every person who ever truly knew Brati. Every friend, every shadow, every quiet corner of his emotional world that she was perhaps never invited into while he lived. She is piecing her son back together, one conversation at a time — reclaiming Brati from the number they buried him under. A mother reclaims her deceased son over fragments of memories. Mahasweta Devi’s writing doesn’t dramatize pain — she simply places it in front of you, unflinching.
In Kalbela, Madhabilata stands as the pillar of strength for her son, Arka, insulating him from the wreckage of his father’s past and the harsh realities of their environment. Madhabilata carries her world alone. No anchor from a husband, no cushion of support — just the quiet, dignified grind of a woman who works, sustains, and persists so that Arka can have a life softer than her own. She doesn’t martyr herself loudly. She simply shows up, every single day, in that deeply recognizable way that mothers do — invisibly holding everything together while the world looks elsewhere. Arka, young and still finding the edges of himself, carries a certain restlessness that only a missing father can carve into a child. It is fulfilled when a chance visit to his father’s ancestral home shifts something fundamental inside him. Quietly, almost imperceptibly, he begins to change — finding a thread back to his own roots. The ancestral home doesn’t give him a father, but it gives him something equally precious — context and a sense of belonging. And perhaps that is what Madhabilata always silently worked towards – to find a better life for Arka. Madhabilata as a mother excels better than Madhabilata as a wife.
Through this new lens including the knowledge from books even if it’s fictional, I finally see my mother not as a fixed constellation, but as a woman who once navigated her own quiet revolution. Her sacrifices weren’t just duty; they were a fierce, silent preservation of my world. In her grace, I now recognize the same “all-sacrificing” strength that once seemed like fiction, now my own living truth.
Read more about the books I have read so far
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